JK Rowling’s late attempts to make Harry Potter more diverse does nothing for LGBT+ fans like me
I grew up in Edinburgh, the city which inspired the book. The cafe where Rowling wrote The Philosopher’s Stone, tucked in the old town, is a short walk from where I lived. Behind it sits the castle, surveying the city on a hill of solidified magma, much like Hogwarts. I even ran into Rowling once in Starbucks, so the line between the muggle and wizarding worlds often seemed even thinner than it was portrayed in her books.
Rowling’s interventions have become meme-able because they often seem tone deaf. People who are HIV positive, for example, didn’t much like their disease – which is entirely controllable and livable – being compared to a dangerous, murderous and out-of-control werewolf. People also– the submissive property of white male Voldemort – being portrayed by a South Korean woman.
It is hard to take these revelations about Dumbledore’s sexuality seriously if they weren’t noticeable in the original books and movies. Rowling’s updates, announced with much fanfare, don’t really help gay children today. We don’t need to know whether Dumbledore sees the male cast of Hollyoaks naked when he looks in The Mirror of Erised, or whether there’s a gay night – complete with dark room – in The Three Broomsticks. We all know the Marauder’s Map wasn’t a metaphor for gay hookup app Grindr and it doesn’t help to pretend it was.
Despite new films and the stage adaptation, the glory days of the Harry Potter franchise are behind us. Written in the 1990s and early 2000s, most of us can accept the lack of LGBT+ characters as a ‘sign of the times’ just as we ignore casual homophobia in sitcoms like FriendsUltimately, LGBT+ people – both children and adults – will be better aided by today’s authors seamlessly embedding our existence into their work. That’s when the magic will really happen.
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